MessageOutrageous love is the most obvious characteristic of
Jesus, and therefore it is the one thing that will make us recognisable
as his followers.

Sermon

If you ask the average Aussie about how they would identify a
Christian, the chances are that you will get one mention of something
they do, and probably a bit of a list of things they don’t do.
The one identifying thing they do will be “they go to
church.” If the person has recently been targeted by one of those
pushy street evangelist types who try to force themselves on you if you
are walking or sitting alone in public and won’t let you go until
they have got through their rehearsed spiel on “the
gospel”, then they might add that, with obvious contempt in their
voice, but mostly it will probably just be “they go to
church.” The list of don’t will vary a bit, depending on
who they’ve bumped into recently. Perhaps “they don’t
drink”, or “they don’t swear”, or “they
don’t have sex until they are married” might feature, but
increasingly the strident right-wing Christian political agenda has
narrowed the list down to “they don’t tolerate
homosexuals” and “they don’t allow abortion”.

Jesus must be heartbroken over this. Being against things is a million
miles away from what he wanted his followers to be known for. As we
heard in the gospel reading tonight, Jesus told his followers,
“Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love
one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if
you have love for one another.” Presumably then, the answer that
Jesus would wish for his followers to have inspired from the average
Aussie Joe in the street is “They bloody well love everybody,
those Christians. They’ve got no idea! They treat scum like
royalty. They think everyone should be welcome here. They want a second
chance for every lowlife loser. They don’t seem to know when to
stop. I mean, I’m all for love your neighbour and love your
family and all that, but charity is supposed to start at home, and
these Jesus followers, they are just fanatical about it, They
don’t seem to know when to stop.”

Tragically, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that answer
given. It did seem to be given about Jesus himself, though, and I guess
that’s the point. The first horizon of Jesus’ words were
the period immediately after his departure. That’s clear, even
from the context, because these words about the new commandment follow
immediately on from him saying “I am only going to be with you
for a little while longer.” They are part of his conversation
with the disciples at the last supper, and are kind of his parting
words, his last will and testament if you like. So in the short term he
is thinking about a situation in which people will remember what he was
like when he was walking the streets, and so the point is that people
will recognise his disciples by their similarity to him. They will say,
“These people treat everyone the way that Jesus bloke treated
everyone. They must be followers of his, because nobody else would
behave like that.”

For that to be the case — for people to automatically make that
connection — there has to be this over-the-top, above-and-beyond
aspect to the love that is shown. It is quite common for the average
Aussie to say, “Yeah, I reckon I’m a Christian; I follow
the golden rule, love your neighbour, and all that.” But Jesus is
clearly suggesting that what people will notice is something that is
clearly abnormal, notably beyond the norm. In another context, that was
the point of Jesus offering the parable of the good Samaritan in answer
to the question, “who is my neighbour?” Loving your
neighbour is not the least bit radical, so long as you can give your
own safe definition of who your neighbour is. As Jesus said in the
sermon on the mount, “why should you expect any special reward
for loving those who love you? Even the gangsters and people smugglers
do that.” And so when the person to whom he says “love your
neighbour” asks “who is my neighbour?”, he tells the
parable of the good Taliban terrorist and says “there’s
your neighbour.” No wonder they called him a fanatic and took
offence.

Right the way through the gospel accounts, the things that are
constantly getting Jesus into trouble with the religious leaders, and
sometimes - for example in his home town - with the general public, are
things where his words and actions make loving someone a priority over
obeying rules, observing social niceties, and maintaining the
conventional boundaries of who is my neighbour and who is not.

“This bloke needs healing and I could do it, but it’s the
Sabbath and I’m not supposed to do that sort of thing on the
Sabbath. Stuff it. I love him. why make him wait any longer. I’ll
do it now.” TROUBLE!

“This woman has been caught committing adultery, and the crowd
have gathered to execute her by stoning as the law requires. Do I
endorse the law and let them do it. No! Love does not stand by and let
this woman die. I’ll stick my neck out and point out that
she’s no worse than anyone else here and challenge them to claim
otherwise. That should save her.” Big Trouble!

“These people are sitting here in the synagogue applauding me for
saying that God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and
recovery of sight to the blind, but they are so racist. They hate the
Sidonians and the Syrians. I’ll tell them that God loves the
Sidonians and the Syrians just as much as them and that God wants them
to do likewise.” Big big trouble. This guy is going to get
himself thrown off a cliff.

Actually this last example is the same issue we see played out in the
reading we heard tonight from the Acts of the Apostles. And it goes to
show that the first generation of Jesus’ followers were still
struggling with the implications of this boundary breaking love after
his resurrection and ascension. They were still caught up in an
assumption that to be a follower of Jesus meant being Jewish, but God
had sent Peter to speak to the household of Cornelius who was not only
a gentile, but an officer in the hated Roman occupation forces. And
when God obviously pours out the Holy Spirit on Cornelius and his
family, Peter and the church leaders have to decide what to make of
this outrageous disregard of the boundaries. Are they supposed to love
these people? Accept them? Sit and eat at the same table with them?
Unthinkable! It goes against everything they’ve been brought up
to believe! But they rightly conclude that if the Lord himself is
breaking the boundaries and pouring out his love on these people, then
they either have to follow suit or get themselves out of step with what
God is doing, so they had better love as Jesus loves, no matter what
trouble it might cause.

Perhaps then, instead of just saying, “If you love like me then
everyone will know that you are my followers,” Jesus could have
said, “If you love so generously and extravagantly and
outrageously that you stir up scandal and controversy and get denounced
as fanatics and lunatics and sympathisers and bleeding hearts, then
everyone will know that you must be one of my lot.”

Now at the risk of undermining half of what I’ve just said,
I’m going to focus on a couple of examples for us that draw the
circles of neighbourliness fairly close to home and ask how we express
the love of Jesus here. I am not, for a moment, suggesting that there
are not just as many challenges to today’s Christian community in
looking at how we love those who are often hated in our society. There
are still far too many Christians ready to support more militant border
control on the grounds of protecting Australia’s interests, when
such nationalistic motives are clearly exactly what God was
overthrowing in the house of Cornelius and in Jesus’ sermon at
Nazareth. There are still far too many Christians who support the
withholding of basic legal rights from homosexual people, although I
must acknowledge that the usually vehemently anti-gay Australian
Christian Lobby recently offered qualified support to the state
Government’s proposal to establish a “relationships
register” as a way of redressing such legal obscenities, and they
did so on the grounds that, whatever your view on the morality of gay
sex, such legal discriminations were an indefensible violation of the
call to love all people.

There is still plenty that could be said about such issues. But I want
to look at a couple of the issues that we have on our plate right now,
and ask how the new commandment to love as Jesus loved might help us
understand where God is calling to follow.

What might the call to love as Jesus loved mean for our consideration
of what sort of funeral rites we would use when one of our own
congregation dies? This is not just a question of getting things
liturgically right. It is about how we care for people; how we love
them at an especially vulnerable time. How do we honour the loved one
who is dying and prayerfully help them to die well? How do we honour
the things they stood for when we are burying them? And how do we love
those who loved them and are grieving deeply? And this is one of those
times when the answer may not be just give them whatever it is they
think they want. Any alcoholic will tell you that just giving a
desperate person what they want is not always the loving thing to do.
In a society that treats death as a big taboo and avoids expressing
painful emotions, pandering to that with quick sanitised thanksgiving
services with no coffin in sight and nothing but cheerful memories to
be spoken. It might be as popular as handing another bottle to a drunk,
but it might be at the expense of providing anything that helps people
to negotiate the hard roads of dying and grieving in healthy and
liberating ways. But it also wouldn’t be loving to try to sort
this out the day someone dies. Frances is giving us a real gift at the
moment by being open about her impending death and being interested in
what sort of funeral rites might be used and how they might balance the
needs of congregation, her non-church friends and her family. And the
fact that she is someone who is so beloved among us makes it easier for
us to focus on it as an act of love.

What might the call to love as Jesus loved mean for our consideration
of the place of children in our congregational life? It is probably
more common for congregations the size of ours to focus on the need to
incorporate the adults into the common life of the prayer and ministry,
and to think of the children just as encumbrances that have to be
“looked after” in order to allow their parents’
involvement. But following the example of Jesus who placed a small
child in the midst of the disciples and said “Here’s the
starting point for thinking about how the life of the kingdom is to be
lived out,” clearly our starting point is to think of the
children as important parts of the congregation in their own right. It
is, of course, easy to feel loving towards children at the cute age
that most of the one’s here are at, but it is not about feeling
loving, it is about putting love into practice. No one here is going to
want to destroy the contemplative beauty of our worship in order to ape
the “family friendly” model of some of the bigger churches
around. There is not only one model of how to make the children welcome
and included. We need to find the way that works for who we are, not
for who some other successful church is. In our covenant, we commit
ourselves to “offering welcome and hospitality to anyone who
wishes to share in the life of our church, regardless of age, race,
gender, sexuality or life experience,” and “regardless of
age” means we are committing ourselves to finding patterns that
are inclusive for children just as much as we are committed to finding
ways of including other people who might not fit our dominant
demographic stereotypes. How will we ensure that these children
experience themselves as loved, valued and included here, rather than
just “provided for” in order to allow the “more
important” adults to do their “more important” adult
thing?

Jesus’ call to love as he loved affects pretty much every
question and issue we face in life, both as a congregation and as
individuals in the other circles we move in. It goes to the core of our
discipleship, not just because Jesus issued it with the force of a
commandment, but because it was the most distinctive feature of his own
life and ministry, of his own way of being. When we gather around this
table to offer ourselves to Christ and to his people, love is what that
is all about. Loving God; loving one another; loving others. And every
time we gather here, we are challenged again to come to terms with just
how radically and extravagantly and dangerously Jesus loves us, and
with that challenge comes the call to offer ourselves to him, to be
remade in his image, as people who love as he loved, for his glory and
for the liberation of the world.